But she'd taken her book, and she'd left him.
He'd bought it for her because she'd almost worn out the box with use by constantly going through its contents, taking out each item and staring at it, sometimes for an hour or more. It was as if, with everything else lost or otherwise taken away, this was the only means by which she could hold onto her old sense of self. Now it seemed that she'd almost worn out the album, as well; he could see that she'd taken some of the pages that had come loose, and she'd arranged them around the dressing table in a kind of display.
And then he heard a noise.
It was almost nothing, but he knew immediately that someone was leaving the house. He turned and raced back out of the room toward the entranceway, but he was too late. He stood on the porch in a circle of light that spread some distance before the house, leaving the trees beyond in darkness.
"Please, Alina," he called out to the darkness. "At least talk to me. You know I'm not here to hurt you, I couldn't."
Nothing but silence, and a sense of being watched.
So he went back inside. A couple of minutes later he came out again, carrying her album and a lit candle stuck onto a plate by a pool of its own melted wax. He'd found it in the kitchen, on a shelf above the stove. He set it on the square post at the end of the porch rail.
"Don't make me do this," he said, and he waited.
But nothing happened.
So then he took one of the loose pages, held it up high for her to see, and then brought it down and touched its corner to the flame.
An inhuman sound echoed through the forest. It might have been an animal in deep pain and some distance away, but Pavel doubted it. He dropped the burning paper and it hit the ground before the porch, turning over a couple of times and shedding sparks and ash.
The sound died, and nothing else happened; so he prepared to burn a second page.
And that, at last, brought her out.
"No!" she said, and she stepped into the light.
He almost couldn't believe that the moment had finally come. He'd thrown away everything, stripped his life right down to nothing, and all of it had been for this. She'd all but destroyed him and he knew it, just as he knew that if he could have returned to the beginning he'd have made all the same choices over again. That, he'd long ago come to understand, was the penalty of loving the Rusalka; it was to embrace your own destruction, and embrace it willingly.
And now, here it stood.
Pavel was so relieved that he almost wanted to weep. He stared at her, drank her in; but he didn't dare to move toward her in case she should turn and leave him again.
"Why did you follow me?" she said.
"You know why," he said. "I never had a choice."
"Are you alone?"
"Since the summer began. They sent me over to find you, but I ran away. They never knew about us."
Alina moved to the steps now, but she didn't climb them to him.
"Oh, Pavel," she said, sadly.
He could read her. The signs that would have been invisible to others were plain to the eyes of one who knew her so well.
He said, "She's stronger, isn't she?"
"She's stronger. There's no difference between us any more. I thought that if I left the land, I could break the spell. But it didn't work. Wherever I am, becomes the land again. Pavel, why did you come? You were safe from me back there."
"Because there's no life for me without you," Pavel said, and it was no less than the truth. She looked up at him for a while and he fed upon that look, on its affection and its apprehension and its regret.
And then, without meeting his eyes any more, Alina climbed the steps and took the scrapbook from his hands.
"Come with me," she said, and she placed the book safely in the shelter of the porch. "There's something I want you to see."
Pavel was on edge, sensing the moment that was coming even though its details had yet to become clear.
He said, "Is it far?"
"It's no distance at all," Alina said, and she took his arm to guide him down.
"Wake up, Jed," Diane whispered gently. After parking the Zodiac on the gravel by the side entrance to Liston Hall, she'd said Home at last in what she'd hoped was a confident, untroubled voice, and she'd turned around to find him with his eyes closed and his mouth open and his comics still held close to his chest. His eyes fluttered now as she spoke. She knew that she could probably walk him up to his bedroom and undress him and put him into bed, and he wouldn't remember anything about it in the morning. He'd say that he did, but he wouldn't.
"Come on," she said as she slipped her hand behind his head, and she supported him as he groped and fumbled his way out onto the gravel. There he winced, and peered around, but already his eyelids were drooping again. One of his comics fell, and she picked it up as she began to guide him toward the house.
The stranger had followed her for some of the way, of that much she was certain. There had been far off headlights in her rearview mirror for some considerable distance. She'd cut the Zodiac's own lights and pulled into an off the road layby which consisted of a picnic area and a screen of trees with a No Camping sign, and she was pretty sure that she'd managed to lose him; she heard him pass and saw his lights as a flicker through the bushes, and then she'd waited another ten minutes in case he came back. He hadn't. She'd inadvertently led him toward the valley and the lake (She'll be somewhere close to water, he'd said) but at least she would take him no further.
Jed thought it was all some kind of big adventure. Tomorrow, he'd probably think it had been some kind of a dream. She'd let him go on thinking so. She wondered if Pete would see her note and call her tonight, or if his interpretation of the word urgent meant that sometime in the morning would do. Would that matter? Surely nothing was going to happen before morning.
Jed came first. Always. Every time. That was the principle she believed in, anyway, even if she sometimes found her behaviour drifting away from the ideal.
First thing tomorrow, if he hadn't been in touch, she'd go down to the yard and tell Pete about everything that had happened. He could decide how much of it to believe, if anything.
A few hours couldn't make any difference.
So now, with her hand gently cradling the back of his head, she steered Jed onward in the direction of his room.
Alina has stayed a few paces before him on the descent to the shore. Pavel has been stumbling in the darkness and having trouble keeping up; she seems to move with hardly any effort, and she never puts a foot wrong.
Finally, they reach the water's edge. There hasn't been any rainfall in a while and the level has dropped, making a narrow strip of shoreline which ends at the high water point like a bite taken out of the turf. This small, temporary beach is covered in twigs and straw debris that has dried out in the heat of the days and which now crunches underfoot like the bones of mice. Alina draws him across, and turns him to face the valley; the vestigial light of the long day is enough to block in the shape of its immense sides, even now.
She says, "This is it. What do you see?"
"Water," he says. "Mountains. Stars."
"Does it remind you of anywhere?"
"Home," he says, even though it doesn't. The mountains are too high and the stars are all wrong, but he knows that this will be what she's expecting to hear. She sees it differently, and he hasn't sought her out to argue.
"It is my home now," she says. "Stand at the edge. Don't turn around."
Nervously, he does as he's been told.
From behind him, she says, "Do you know what you're asking?"